The panel was still hanging in the air where the system had left it—a clean rectangle of pale blue light with thin silver edges. Ash sat cross-legged on the floor and looked at it for a long moment without doing anything.
He did not know how to use it. There were no buttons. There was no handle. When he reached out with one finger and tried to tap the corner, his hand passed straight through without so much as a ripple. That was a little disappointing. In the novels, the protagonist always seemed to know exactly how to operate his system on the first try, as if somebody had handed him a manual at birth.
It probably runs on thought, he decided. Everything else in my life does now.
So he tried.
He pictured the panel closing. It vanished.
He blinked, then thought of it again, and it reappeared.
He closed it, opened it, closed it once more.
He thought of it a little bigger and it grew.
He thought of it smaller and it shrank to the size of a playing card.
